Towards a framework of enforcing resilient operation of cyber‐physical systems with unknown dynamics

Abstract

Ensuring that safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPSs) continue to satisfy correctness and safety specifications even under faults or adversarial attacks is very challenging, especially in the presence of legacy components for which accurate models are unknown to the designer. Current techniques for secure-by-design systems engineering do not provide an end-to-end methodology for a designer to provide real-time assurance for safety-critical CPSs by identifying system dynamics and updating control strategies in response to newly discovered faults, attacks or other changes such as system upgrades. We propose a new methodology, along with an integrated framework implemented in MATLAB to guarantee the resilient operation of safety-critical CPSs with unknown dynamics. The proposed framework consists of three main components. The runtime monitor evaluates the system behaviour on-the-fly against its correctness specifications expressed as signal temporal logic formulas. The model synthesiser incorporates a sparse identification approach that is used to continually update the plant model and control policies to adapt to any changes in the system or the environment. The decision and control module designs a controller to ensure that the correctness specifications are satisfied at runtime. For evaluation, we apply our proposed framework to ensure the resilient operations of two CPS case studies.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.